Over 80 Muslim Organizations Urge the Justice Department to Investigate a Terrorism-Research Group

Feb. 10 2022

On January 31, a letter signed by more than 80 American Muslim organizations was sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The letter alleges that the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT), a nonprofit founded by Steve Emerson in 1995, has launched a coordinated effort to infiltrate and spy on the U.S. Muslim community; the letter repeatedly refers to IPT as a “hate group.”

In December, CAIR’s Ohio chapter fired its director, Romin Iqbal, who had admitted to providing information to the IPT. A month later, CAIR also accused Tariq Nelson of the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, one of the DC region’s largest mosques, of being an informant for IPT.

Much of the reporting on this story has omitted CAIR’s troubling history; among other things, prominent CAIR members have been convicted of terrorism-related charges, and in 2014 CAIR was designated as a terrorist group by the United Arab Emirates. In his reporting on the issue, A.J. Caschetta lists these and other common oversights in media coverage of CAIR’s accusations:

[The Washington Post reporters Michelle Boorstein and Hannah Allam] fail to mention important facts about CAIR, such as that the FBI cut off all relations with CAIR in 2009 because of its Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas connections, and that the Department of Justice reprimanded several FBI field offices in 2013 for failing to do so. Instead they simply refer to CAIR as “the nation’s biggest Muslim civil-rights group,” while quoting a CAIR spokesman identifying the IPT as a “dangerous . . . Islamophobic group.”

Worse still, Boorstein and Allam refer uncritically to the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center simply as “one of the DC region’s largest mosques.” . . . The Dar Al-Hijrah Center and mosque in Falls Church, Virginia have a long and storied history of terrorist-related activity. Built in 1991 with Saudi money through the North American Islamic Trust, the deed to the property was signed by Jamal al-Barzinji, of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The center’s founder was Ismail Elbarasse, a Muslim Brotherhood big-shot who had in his possession the infamous 1991 memo documenting the Muslim Brotherhood’s plan to wage “civilizational jihad” against the U.S.

The Dar Al-Hijrah mosque has also had a series of radical preachers leading Friday prayers. Anwar al-Awlaki, the imam in charge during the 9/11 era, was found to have aided and abetted the 9/11 hijackers and to have recruited for al-Qaeda.

Read more at National Review

More about: American Muslims, CAIR, Islamic Jihad, Muslim Brotherhood

Fake International Law Prolongs Gaza’s Suffering

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.

Read more at Jewish Chronicle

More about: Gaza War 2023, International Law